


Death of a Naturalist

by AVMabs



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood, Frogs, Gen, Pre-Series, psa I'm not Seamus Heaney
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 09:37:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7752508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVMabs/pseuds/AVMabs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They released the tadpoles back into Old Man Amo's pond.  All preoccupation with amphibians ought to have ended at that, except that it didn't, because the natural sciences were as rich as the earth Ed could draw up with alchemy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death of a Naturalist

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist'. That said, I am not Seamus Heaney. 
> 
> I've taken some liberties with when Trisha died, because her dying in 1904 just doesn't work for me in the context of the whole series, so I've pushed it forwards to 1906.

It was Trisha who crowned the bullfrogs first; she hailed them as ‘slime kings’ and Ed spent the rest of the day running around the house with a blanket over his head, pretending that he was The Slime King. Alphonse was his Slime Knave (Alphonse didn’t want to be his Slime Knave, so he took to scribbling on a piece of old newspaper for the rest of the day). 

On the way to school, Edward named Winry as the nominal Slime Princess whilst Alphonse’s five-year-old head nodded as sagely as it could.  
The sun beat down that day. Lush greenery had become an army – great yellow spears surged up to the children’s knees and jabbed warnings at their tiny legs as they hurtled down the hills towards the red-brick roof of school. 

The first child had fainted from the heat before the children had even arrived; a wispy, pale boy who seldom attended school. Edward wondered why his parents had bothered to send him to school today of all days. (Later, he would realise that even parents whose children were weak in constitution recognised they were safer under the watch of a teacher). He dumped a pail of water over the boy, who woke up choking and never spoke to Ed again.  
The children did not consider it a great loss: the boy liked to try to give the younger children Chinese Burns.

“It’s summer,” said Miss Wellington. 

Ed rolled his eyes and sighed. “This is a farming village,” he interjected.

Miss Wellington spared him a glance, but didn’t respond. “It’s summer,” she said, “so we’re going to think about animals.” She said animals like animals were a new concept to even the stupidest kid in the class (an eight-year-old called Andrew, who, incidentally – had not come to school today). Four animal prints by a famous artist made their way out of her desk one by one: a bumblebee, a badger, a moth…

“A slime king!” shouted Edward, raising onto his feet slightly.

Al’s eyes lit up in recognition next to him, but he didn’t speak.

“Edward.” Said Miss Wellington in her most warning voice. Her eyes glinted dangerously and her lips curled in on themselves. It was a shame she felt the need to do that with them; if she would just let her lips be lips, she would be much prettier much more of the time. “Quiet, please.” She swept onwards. “Who can name the animals?”  
Every child’s hand shot up in the air, and in the end one of the girls who had just turned seven lisped out the answers. 

“Good!” simpered Wellington. “Now, what do we think a baby frog looks like?”

Ed crossed his arms. “It isn’t called a baby frog,” he said. “It's called a froglet.”

Wellington filled her smile with simpering false patience. “Not quite,” she said. “It’s a tadpole.”

One of Ed’s hands shot up into the air whilst he seethed with rage, but Wellington ignored him. He knew that they were called froglets; he had read it in March, when mum had taken them to the pond on Old Man Amo’s land. They had collected great colonies of frogspawn, scooping them up into jam jars and listening to the slick, wet ‘schwip’ against the sides of the jars all the way home.

They let the tadpoles out in April, but some of them never made it quite so far.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ed saw Al’s hand draw through thick air until it stood, stout, where Wellington would not be able to help but notice. His heart swelled, and the seething anger and humiliation in his chest gave way to excitement at the comeuppance that Wellington was about to receive.  
Wellington smiled sweetly. “Yes, Alphonse?”

“Excuse me, Ma’am?” said Alphonse quietly. “But Edward is right. A tadpole isn’t a baby frog – it’s larva. We read it in one of our books.”

“Well,” said Wellington, even as her cheeks began to flush pink, and she held so tight to the print that Ed thought for a moment it would rip. “Thank you, Alphonse. Now, what do we think,” she paused, “a tadpole looks like?”

-

The same hills the children loved to run down became enemies as they made their ways up the hills. Each one of their calves burned with exertion, and their mouths longed for the sweet taste of water. Ed and Al and Winry held hands on the way up, in mutual support of one another as they scaled the hills, covering more and more distance until they finally reached Old Man Amo’s pond.

They each peered into the pond, looking for Amphibian Life in spite of the fact that the water was so murky with pondweed that they could not see their own reflections without dipping a hand into the water and disturbing the peace.

On the far side of the pond, a dragonfly adorned in shimmering turquoise and green flitted restlessly from side to side. A tell-tale whine warned them of the advancement of a mosquito, and Al flinched and cowered whilst the other two swatted and jeered until it went away. A mosquito would not detract them from their mission; they had scaled mountains for this, and they were very close. 

They stared vigilantly at pondweed and the occasional wasp until, finally, the landscape grew awash with orange-red and Winry declared she was thirsty for lemonade. Running down the hills held the same exhilaration as always, and they could not think of a better end to the day.

-

The rains arrived in August. Dry soils set aside for last-minute planting became marshland. Trisha forbade her children from attempting entry into the floodplains near the Old Man Amo’s farm, citing them as too dangerous to play in. 

In the middle of the month, Alphonse caught a nasty cold. He stayed home from school, leaving Ed to challenge Wellington all by himself. The day had been trying but energising (as always, Ed had grown frustrated at literacy but relished the ease of arithmetic), and he could not bear to return home.

“I have an errand to run,” he informed Winry.

Splitting off from her, he hiked up to Old Man Amo’s farm in spite of his mother’s warning. He unlatched the gate, whose wood was soft and slick with moisture, and trekked onto the land. He listened intently to squelch of his saddle-shoes in the mud as he waded further towards the pond.

At one point, the mud became deep, too deep for Ed to try to force his way through and still hope to keep both shoes, so he veered off mindlessly in the other direction, silencing a yelp as he walked into greenery and felt thousands of soft leaves grab for his shins. He walked onwards, forcing his face into a determined grimace even as he looked down and saw white-red lumps colonising over his skin.

He knew he was nearing the pond once he was through the nettles. The bluebells, stooped with rain that had doubtless left them turgid and sluggish, were the marker that suggested he was just minutes away. He lurched onwards, until, finally, he felt he was nearing his target.  
It was an odd sound that stopped him.

The faint sound hit his ears, low and discomfited, and carried to him from the wind like a hasty warning of pending doom. He shook it off and moved onwards; sounds were normal. He could expect the sounds.

The chorus grew louder the closer he grew to the pond until he arrived. A wave of relief and determination washed over him anew as he saw the familiar covering of pondweed and smelt the murk of unclean water.

He walked straight up to the edge, and then the source of the chorus grew clear.

He staggered backwards, his heart pounding against his sternum, and no matter how he scraped his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he could not dispel the dryness that overtook it. He trembled, seized by horror and the sense that he needed to run, to go far away and never again disturb the pond, but his legs would not lift to allow him to turn on heel and flee. 

In front of him, at least thirty brown creatures covered the pond, crouching in wait. Their necks bulged, filling as though with the damp swell of burgeoning rage and then drew suddenly inwards and created that sound. The scraping bass they produced permeated his skin and filled his bones with dread.

‘Gggg-maow.’

‘Gggg-maow.’

They sounded over and over again, calling their ominous call and receiving no answer. The rain intensified and the brown grew slicker and browner, the frogs seeming to grow. They gleaned a vitality from the same rain that had turned mum’s vegetable patch into a thick sludge. Eyes that had seemed to be plotting before grew hard and assured.

Ed wished his legs to stir into action and move, to get him away from the army so aptly adorned in khaki and murk before him, but they would not. He hoped that in all the rest of his life, he would never again see such an army.

A bluebottle flew too close. One of the creatures, scarcely bothering to turn its head, let a strip of long, thick slobber protrude from its mouth. The fly stuck, and it swallowed.

Finally, as Ed began to sicken, his legs began to move. 

They took him through the nettles and ignored the sharp welts spreading over their surface. He sprinted down the hills, scarcely aware that he was sobbing as he filled his lungs with air that stretched them so that they reminded him too much of those necks bulging at him. They could not conceal their rage at him, and as he saw a crow pluck a bright strawberry from its stalk, he was reminded of the jam jars. He had raised them, these frogs, into Slime Kings, and in return they surged their vengeful song through him.

Trisha was waiting for him outside the house, and he dove into her arms sobbing, even as she reprimanded him for being so late. He felt the thrum of her heart against his ear, and even as his terror ebbed into pain from the nettle-stings covering his legs, he felt shame. He had held the frogs as his hostage, and they resented him.

He hardly felt Trisha rubbing a cream over his legs and carrying him to bed, felt nothing but guilt until Al trudged into his room and curled up next to him.

“Mum brought in one of the hens today,” said Al. “I stroked its feathers.” He spoke similar drivel for a whole fifteen minutes until, finally, his voice replaced the sound of the frogs’ great anthem.


End file.
